For me, flexibility is the beauty of Pentecost/Ordinary Time/summer time. I’ve done whole summers on the Psalms; it’s a great time to delve into the Old Testament. Interestingly, this week’s epistle and gospel lections do this themselves: they preach (if you will) on an Old Testament text. I’ll comment on those, but this Sunday I will personally preach on 1 Samuel 3:1-20 (the lectionary seems to leave you the option of stopping at v. 10, which would lop off key moments in the drama!) and lean into the Epistle as well.

Back on January 14 of this year, we had the same text! My comments focused on several things: (a) how hearing God didn’t happen randomly, just anywhere, but in a sanctuary, with daily readings, lightings of candles, prayers, oblations, etc. — so practices of devotion and worship matter if you hope to hear God; (b) how prayer isn’t so much “Hear our prayer, O Lord,” but “Speak Lord, your servant is listening”; and then (c) how the hearing and advent of God’s Word isn’t comfort and light, but drastic change, downright destruction of what is awry. I cited Marianne Williamson’s lovely thought that if you ask God into your life, God doesn’t show up to do a little interior decorating or sprucing up, but God arrives like a wrecking ball to tear your world down to its foundations and start over.

In addition to those crucial thoughts on 1 Samuel 3, I want to explore Eli a bit further – partly because it occurs to me you could do a lot with maybe my favorite post-apocalyptic film, The Book of Eli ("the word of the Lord was rare," he's blind, a young child figures prominently, etc.). A good friend, Rev. George Ragsdale, spoke on this recently, and I was moved and stirred by what he did. Speaking to clergy about to screen candidates for ordination, he raised the question of how Eli understood (or didn’t!) that Samuel was being called by God.

Eli’s ability to figure out what was going on was compromised, first by his own physical frailty. He’s old, tired, visually impaired. How often do our aches and pains, our own physical weariness, keep us from hearing God or from realizing what God might be doing? How often, simply being tired, do we go back to bed and assume it can’t really be God speaking or doing a new thing?

Eli’s mounting blindness isn’t just physical; it’s symbolic of his leadership. He’s blinded by love and attachment to his own sons (as was Samuel, and David) who were scoundrels, who “had no regard for the Lord,” and who abused their priestly prerogatives. As I explored in my book, Weak Enough to Lead, all leaders show up for work with whatever they left at home still rattling around in their heads. When you preach or pastor, you carry, probably hidden in silence, a struggle you had with your son, a spat with your spouse, a harsh word from your mother. It impacts what you do; the people to whom you preach experience the same thing in their worlds. So we name these Eli situations, the recognition and naming offering some mercy where there isn’t much other mercy to be had. Of course, God might use that hidden brokenness which can become compassion for others…

Finally, doesn’t Eli suspect that if he helps Samuel hear God’s Word, that would prove to be the final blow against him and his own family’s failed leadership? As George put it, might it be that God will even call the church to something we don’t recognize, as much as we love the place, and that we’ll be the ones left behind? Can we help the church hear even that calling that will cost us plenty?

To me, this narrative drives us directly into the non-narrative arms of the epistle. In 2 Corinthians 4:5-12, Paul clarifies what we know but don’t put on resumes or admit to pulpit committees: “We have this treasure in clay jars” (or a Victor Paul Furnish translates, “earthen pots”). Many understand these to be vessels used for the offering of sacrifice, as they could then be broken up and disposed of if they became ritually unclean. Like Eli, we are such earthen vessels… The image of the broken, breakable, sacrificial pottery piece can be probed endlessly. Wasn’t it Leonard Cohen who wrote “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in”?